Are Dispositions Reducible?

Although this definition is open to decisive objections, most of which are not new, NCA is not yet dead. There are still those of us who ask, on the presupposition that NCA or something very similar is the correct analysis of dispositions, whether dispositions can explain their manifestations, or whether the bearers of nothing but dispositional properties can fill space, or whether colours are mere dispositions in the objects to create sensations in viewers. The main difficulty of NCA has always been to see how the simple non-material conditional in the definiens describes a genuine intrinsic property at all. The conditional does not seem to be saying anything about what it is, in the object, that makes the response follow upon the stimulus. Dispositions, on this account, appear to be descendants of Malebranche properties (x has a Malebranche disposition iff, if the stimulus event occurs, then God directly brings about x’s response). Secular occasionalism, although familiar from the bad old days when behaviourism ruled in the philosophy of mind, is not confined to psychology. It arises whenever an The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No.  January  ISSN –